the impact of religiosity and religious orientation on the mental health of the students of university of mazandaran

the main purpose of this study is to explore the correlation between religion and mental health. therefore, using some socio-psychological theories, the study seeks to investigate the relationships between religiosity, religious orientation, perceived social support, and optimism with mental health of university students. the study has been conducted via survey method and data collected by self-administered questionnaire. the universe of the study was 7083 undergraduate students of the university of mazandaran. overall, 405 students were chosen through proportional stratified random sampling method as subjects of the study. the descriptive results of the study showe that on the basis of ghq-28, 55/7 percent of the students recognized as having proper mental health, while 44/3 percent of them suspected to mental disorders. in addition, almost 60 percent of the students reported high degree of religiosity and religious orientation of majority of them was external. moreover, two-thirds of the students enjoyed middle optimism and more than half of them, perceived high degree of social support. furthermore, the results of the analysis of variance (anova) show that mean numbers of mental health was significantly different by degree of religiosity, internal religious orientation, degree of optimism, and degree of social support. applying multivariate regression analysis, however, it has been appeared that the degree of students’ mental health was under direct influence of such variables as perceived social support, degree of optimism, and internal religious orientation; while external religious orientation and degree of religiosity had indirect effects on the degree of students’ mental health, through increasing social support and optimism. the implication of the study is that internal religious orientation is the most effective factor to improve the mental health of students, as compared to degree of religiosity and external religious orientation.